HELLO and welcome to the 163rd installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about face transplants! This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.

I’ve probably shared a lot of articles on this topic, but it bears repeating, and this one has some particularly stark numbers regarding the corporations benefitting from slave labour via the criminal justice system, and how much money has been poured into prisons while being yanked out of schools. And this is from 1998, so think about THAT.

“Though we’re seldom aware of it, our bodies synchronize with the bodies around us, till one begins to wonder if the concept of free will means associating with people you don’t mind copying. (This is why we hang out with people who agree with us. They give us back to ourselves.)”

“If you want more distraction, you can fantasize that Jordan, who played Wallace from the first season of The Wire, is still Wallace, that Wallace wasn’t really shot by his two friends as part of their initiation into the higher ranks of the Barksdale Gang but instead escaped to California, where he was eventually shot by a police officer who claimed, in court, that he’d mistaken his gun for his taser and got off with a two-year suspended manslaughter sentence. In other words, in the garden of forking paths of black urban life, too many roads lead to the bullet.”

Man I wish this article was like a billion more pages. I’d never heard of this author, but apparently she was epically popular and successful, and then moved to a hermitage in Ireland and died alone, very young.

“Two taps on the door, it opened and the gang was all there — four disenfranchised African-Americans posted up in a 9 x 11 prison-size tenement, one of those spots where you enter the front door, take a half-step and land in the yard. I call us disenfranchised, because Obama’s selfie with some random lady or the whole selfie movement in general is more important than us and the conditions where we dwell.”

This is one to read on your laptop and you can spend 20 minutes with it or an entire afternoon ’cause there are so many stories and so much media that went in to this portrait of the rapidly-gentrifying Mission Neighborhood in San Francisco. Really it’s fantastic you need to sit down with this.

A Hundred Women, by Alma Guillermopreieto for The New Yorker, September 2003

An old piece on a story that continues, this one focusing on a particular girl who was killed in Chihuahua City, when murders there began looking like the murders in Ciudad Juárez, and the couple who went to jail for it despite not doing it.

Riese is the 37-year-old CEO, CFO and Editor-in-Chief of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, blogger, fictionist, copywriter, video-maker, low-key Jewish power lesbian and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and then headed West. Her work has appeared in nine books including "The Bigger the Better The Tighter The Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty, Body Image & Other Hazards Of Being Female," magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

not sure this will help with your posting images, but I had better luck once I started re-typing the code into the comment field myself, rather than just copy-pasting the code. We have now reached the end of my html knowledge. *flies away*

You actually only need to retype the quotation marks–something about the fonts on here makes them…wrong somehow? Some other lovely straddler figured this out and told me about it during my first Friday Open Gif Thread. Sweet Memorieees!